Sinatra’s Programmed Uncertainty: The Fermata and Other Deviations
(Try this – begin with a list of key words and arrange a pattern from them. Then develop an essay from this pattern. Your reader will enjoy imagining a multitude of possible themes and arguments arising from your key words. Sinatra’s frequent collaborator, Nelson Riddle, often begins his arrangements, particularly of well-known songs, with a musical method similarly designed to increase desirable uncertainty. He introduces tones the listener will find in the piece, but he doesn’t spell out the melody; hence, the systematic uncertainty of all beginnings meets designed uncertainty half way)
“The greater the uncertainty or entropy in a system, the less the probability that any one outcome will be implicated and the greater the information.” – Leonard Meyer
1) What made Frank Sinatra the greatest musical stylist of the century? Examining the style of his 1953 ballad record, In the Wee Small Hours of The Morning, we find a careful balance between redundancy, which reduces information, and entropy, which increases information. Redundancy provides a familiar context for audiences to test their expectations; at least eight of the sixteen songs on the album (three by Rogers and Hart, two by Arlen, an Ellington, a Porter, and a Carmichael) had become bona-fide classics before Sinatra made this record. And all the songs address the most familiar of popular music themes – affairs of the heart.
But Sinatra establishes these patterns in order to deviate from the courses we expect. In other words, Sinatra’s style yields entropy, hence information. Sinatra virtually invented the Great American Songbook, and he did so by removing great songs from their original contexts in stage shows, Tin Pan Alley catalogues, and movies. Here, he “quotes” the songs for his own purposes, placing them in a new context (the concept album) and giving them new dramatic and emotional weight. By creating a dramatic persona for Wee Small, a man haunted by lost love who sings these songs as if to himself, Sinatra turns our expectations about music inside out, just as his dramatic character turns his own thoughts inside out.
When Sinatra repeats a line within a song, it means something different the second time – and the second delivery changes the meaning of the first one. For instance, in Arlen’s lovely song “I’ll Be Around,” he sings, “Goodbye again / and if you find a love like mine / just now and then / drop a line to say that you’re feeling fine.” When he “repeats” the verse, he cuts the lyrics after “Goodbye again” and remains silent for an unbearably long period, picking up the lyric with “now and then,” but well after the beat where he uttered those words previously. When Sinatra changes the line, the stress (from “then” in the first delivery to “now” in the second), and the moment of his return after the silence, he infuses the lyrics with dramatic urgency – we learn that the character has been, all along, only rehearsing the lines to himself and he still can’t bear the separation called for in the “goodbye again” or the self-imposed isolation called for by the silence, which he ends with a pleading “now.”
So, how many ways to render an action?
So, how many ways to render an action?
So, how many ways to render an action?
(Try this – repetition and variation, or, ask the same question, but get a different answer.)
2) What made Sinatra the greatest musical stylist of the century? The sustained tones, hesitations, and varied emphasis of the continually vulnerable (yet painfully aware) romantic made Sinatra the most prominent auteur of popular song.
Sinatra . . . emphasized key words or notes through a combination of choices related to dynamics (loud or soft) and rhythm (short versus long notes). . . . early in his career Sinatra apparently decided that he liked to stress the first note of the final A section, coming immediately out of the bridge, and he stresses this note in at least one out of every four songs he does. It doesn’t matter that this word often turns out to be as unimportant as something like “and” in “Where or When” or “I Only Have Eyes For You,” or “soon” in “If I Loved You.” . . . . Jim Mayer recalled a conversation with Harold Arlen in which he asked the composer, “‘What songwriter would ever use a fermata on the first note of an eighth-note triplet?’ Harold thought about it and said, “No one. It wouldn’t work.’ I said, ‘Well, you did, in “Last Night When We Were Young.” And you know, Frank Sinatra is the only singer who ever picked up on that.'” – Will Friedwald (146-7)
The fermata, a musical notation, indicates the moment of hesitation. Composers, recognizing the unwritable, denote an unpredictable interstice; hence a fermata is planned, yet fluid, uncertainty. When Sinatra holds or pauses longer than expected, as he does during the verse in “I’ll Be Around,” he reinvigorates the tradition of classic songs. He had a vast and wholly deliberate range of dynamics, from operatic force to aching whisper, more so (arguably) than most singers and therefore he held open more choices (and thus more information). But he also knew how to increase choices by playing with other variable, by altering the stresses or holding a note longer than expected (the fermata) or inserting silence. Sinatra uses the fermata to aggravate questions, begging the implied resolution, avoiding a verse or chorus sung (ever) the same way twice. And in the ballads, the haunted heart anthems (the slower, more contemplative songs that allow time in which to consider and maneuver) time provides proliferations of choice, considerations of a greater number of options, of futures.
The longer a musician holds a note, the more we expect a significant shift:
Musical meaning . . . arises when our expectant habit responses are delayed or blocked – when the normal course of stylistic-mental elements is disturbed by some form of deviation. . . . Three varieties of deviation may be distinguished. (1) The normal, or probable, consequent event may be delayed. Such a delay may be purely temporal or it may involve reaching the consequent through a less direct tonal route, provided that the deviation is understandable as a means to the end in view. (2) The antecedent situation may be ambiguous. That is, several equally probable consequents may be envisaged. When this takes place, our automatic habit responses are inadequate, for they are attuned only to a clear decision about probabilities. And (3) there may be neither delay nor ambiguity, but the consequent event may be unexpected – improbable in the particular context. – Leonard Meyer
The fermata corresponds to Meyer’s first variety of deviation, since it delays the arrival of the consequent, the continued progression of a lyrical and melodic phrase. Fermatas become nodes from which new futures arise. The node, swelled with (possible) meaning, at once blocks the unfolding landscape of events and offers other unfoldings, other directions. A nodal space, at once framed, transcends its own function in narrative or exposition; deliberate vagueness, followed by the focus of technique, implies that style is thought.
3) What, in writing, produces the fermata-effect? One possible approach: the interruption. The typical academic essayist labors to limit the meaning of words to an immediate context (the “style of rigor” – “don’t drift, don’t remind your reader of other contexts”), but we won’t. We’ll interrupt the expected unfolding and deviate. We’ll create our own styles, but how? Puns drift, are vague, are replete, since they burst and overflow, regenerating a myriad of other contexts. Get my drift? Quotation marks select nodal “places,” offering yet another possible means of achieving the “fermata-effect” since they imply interruption by other voices –
Everything will be hesitation, disposition of parts, their alternations and relationships – all this contributing to the rhythmic totality, which will be the very silence of the poem, in its blank spaces, as that silence is translated by each structural element in its own way. – MallarmÃ?©.
Quotation marks interrupt by suggesting purposeful distance from common meaning, a distance both ironic and ideological, since they displace the “composer’s” authority. Can you think of (and try) more ways to establish a pattern and then deviate from it while still keeping the pattern in view? Can you think of (and try) other ways to increase the density of information in academic writing? Do questions themselves produce desirable uncertainty? Since we expect some types of questions in particular contexts, they give rise to less information than questions which are unexpected (and how does one expect deviations?) Imagine a book, as yet unwritten, about the role of the question in generating information. What questions would it ask? How would it interrupt itself?
